What happened to the evidence?

[Monty]

A blood sample was gathered from Coles murder scene at Swallow Gardens.

[John Bennett]

A blood sample was gathered from Coles murder scene at Swallow Gardens.

Interesting factoid, Monty. Do we know why it was taken?

JB

[Suzi]

Or where it is?

So much 'stuff' has disappeared into the ether or in Policemen's pockets /Blitz or whatever- I'm a great fan of the 'box in the attic somewhere' theory too me- Probably labeled 'Uncle Walter's London Pictures 1888' ------I wish!

[Monty]

John

Im currently working on a Coles article and unfortunately Im one place whilst my research is elsewhere. If I remember right Swanson attended the scene and got the sample. I think its in the Evening Standard of Feb 13 1891.

[aspallek]

Also, an attempt at preserving the remains of the Pinchin Street Torso prior to burial was made. What was left of the corpse was sealed in a container of spirits and interred in a common grave at the East London Cemetery near to where the remains of Elizabeth Stride lie. This was probably done more for the possibility of future identification rather than for evidentiary reasons.

[Monty]

I was right

John- I was right! Evening Standard. Its in Connell & Evans The man who hunted...page 92. Im sure its in the sourcebook, along with the reason, which has escaped me, sorry.

[George Hutchinson]

Jonathan - If Dan mentioned this at Knoxville, I don't remember it.

Monty - Any idea why a blood sample was taken if the blood was naturally assumed to be from FC and forensics at that point was so basic that all that could be established was if blood was mammalian (or is that a myth)?

Christine - Forgive my bluntness, but I find your theory utterly bizarre - though it's not the first time I've heard it from someone by any means. DNA is difficult to extract from inside the bones of ancient burials. How could a third party's DNA be extracted when their sole contact with the body would have been fleeting on flesh and clothes long since vanished? What samples would you compare it to even if this were outside the realms of science fiction?

PHILIP

[Chava]

Jonathan - If Dan mentioned this at Knoxville, I don't remember it.

Monty - Any idea why a blood sample was taken if the blood was naturally assumed to be from FC and forensics at that point was so basic that all that could be established was if blood was mammalian (or is that a myth)?

Christine - Forgive my bluntness, but I find your theory utterly bizarre - though it's not the first time I've heard it from someone by any means. DNA is difficult to extract from inside the bones of ancient burials. How could a third party's DNA be extracted when their sole contact with the body would have been fleeting on flesh and clothes long since vanished? What samples would you compare it to even if this were outside the realms of science fiction?

PHILIP

Was there in fact any semen found on or around the bodies? They were prostitutes, so it may not have been indicative if any was found. And he carved up their sexual organs pretty well, so I doubt it would be noticed there among all the blood and tissue. But was there any evidence of sexual activity on the bodies? For some reason I have an idea that they looked and didn't note any.

Also, the dna--should it be found and be testable--would not point to 'Irish' or 'Polish Jew'. It might point to a Jew only if he was a Cohen or a Levi--dna studies have shown that in those cases, a distinct dna link was found on the y chromosome, and the position of priest or levite is passed directly from father to son, along with, apparently, the appropriate chromosome. I doubt you'd get any other nationality, or any other Jew for that matter, off a simple dna test.

[Christine]

Hi Philip.

The killer must have certainly left skin cells in the victims bodies. Even if he wore gloves, but no mask, he probably left skin cells. One cell would be enough, in theory. The DNA would be deteriorated, of course, but that wouldn't necessarily be an insurmountable problem. To use a rough analogy, a body deteriorates into bones and whatever DNA left would be in bones--just a skeleton of the original DNA.

As far as what samples you'd compare it to, first you'd be looking for sequences that only occur in certain sub-populations, like the Irish, or the Polish. This is not definitive because people can move around, of course. But if you had a strong suspect, you could start looking for relatives. A person's DNA matches 50% to a sibling, 25% to a niece or nephew, and so on. And the matches are different for male and female relations, so if you could track down a large number of relations of a suspect, you could say that relation one should match the suspect .1% in this way and .2% in another way, and so on. If a deteriorated DNA on a victim was found to match the relationship profile expected of deteriorated DNA of a suspect, that would be very strong evidence.

Another analogy that might help is of documents cut up into single words. A large percentage of the words in these documents are missing, but they are removed in a partly predictable way--"the" is almost always gone, but "with" is sometimes kept. You have some information about the "Eddows" document--certain unusual words will or won't be found in it. So you look for words that you can't otherwise explain, analyze their relative frequency, and look through your suspect documents for uncommon words found or not found in the amounts predicted by the relatives you've been able to locate.

Or, you look for these key words that are found on all the victims, but don't belong to the victims themselves, and relate them back to what you know about the general population. This sort of technique has been used on living, healthy people to tell descendants of slaves what tribe in Africa their ancestors belonged to, for example. In some cases they've been able to narrow it down to very small populations.

Obviously it is impossible with our current technology. But we might someday have a way of analyzing DNA instantly without completely grinding up and destroying a sample. If we had enough information about human DNA in general, we might be able to pick out bits and pieces and make some definitive statements about a person who touched the bodies.

So while it's very speculative, and may well never be possible, I certainly don't think it's outrageous by any means.

[Christine]

Sorry Chava, posts crossed.

We would have to have a much more extensive database of the human population before any random DNA sample could be definitively called "Irish" or "Jewish" or "Polish Jew" and even then it wouldn't be 100% because people cross populations. But there are already DNA sequences that can be definitively traced to some unknown person who lived in a little village in Germany, and they can even estimate when this person lived by how much variation is found in the sequence. Since the sequence is not found outside of people descended from villagers, either the person lived in the village at the approximate time, or his descendant went to the village not long after. If we knew thousands, or even millions, of these sort of weird sequences, and we could find one on the victims, that would be very interesting. We might someday be able to say "someone who touched this body was descended from a man who lived in Poland in 900 AD and whose descendants are overwhelmingly Jewish." Something along those lines.

[Edward]

Contaminated DNA

How many men do you estimate these women were intimate with over the last three to four days of their lives. I doubt that they thoroughly bathed very frequently. Any stray DNA found on the bodies could be from any number of persons unknown, thus contaminating the sample(s). DNA used to trace ancestors is undoubtedly pristine.

[George Hutchinson]

You are talkng about the retention of intact cells of a third party within the very bones of the victims. I just don't get your reasoning at all.

PHILIP

[jmenges]

Jonathan - If Dan mentioned this at Knoxville, I don't remember it.

Hmm. Well, I thought he was going to mention it in a talk at the conference. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, but who knows. Hopefully his research findings will be described in detail later.

JM

[Frank]

How many men do you estimate these women were intimate with over the last three to four days of their lives. I doubt that they thoroughly bathed very frequently. Any stray DNA found on the bodies could be from any number of persons unknown, thus contaminating the sample(s). DNA used to trace ancestors is undoubtedly pristine.

Let's for a second imagine, that the clothes of the victims were found and that non-victim DNA could be found. I agree that there would be a lot a different DNA from a lot of different men. But if the victims were all killed by one man, his DNA would be on all (or most) of the victims. I don't think that that would apply to anyone other. At least it would be a possibility to shorten the number of suspects.

Surely there would still be the problem of reference specimen, but that would be another topic. But as I said, that's only an imagination as the evidence seems to be lost.

As to the suitability of such old specimen compare the case of Kaspar Hauser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspar_Hauser, in which a much older samples of hair and blood were analysed.

[Jeff Leahy]

I think it most unlikely that any DNA of any value could ever be traced after 120 years. Exhuming the bodies would be almost impossible given that any remains would have shifted and decomposed. Kelly’s grave marker is unlikely to sit on the original spot. And even if you did find some remains that you could identify as MJK, the most you could tell from that DNA test is roughly were MJK came from.

So perhaps the church is correct. Let them rest in peace.

There simply is NO surviving DNA, of any use, and there is unlikely ever to be so.

The letters are Hoax’s, and have been sealed in laminate. (Although I guess its possible the original ‘Lusk Letter’ is out there somewhere and could turn up).

The Shawl is Edwardian.

The Lusk Kidney, I believe survived in a jar to the late 1950’/60’s and was destroyed.

I’m not convinced even the ‘knife’ is actually connected to the case.

Pirate